Although Pinterest’s traffic growth apparently remained flat in the last few months, it is still the most popular photo-sharing social networking service on the web. Yep, more than Instagram and more than Flickr. But with great photo-sharing power comes great copyright responsibility…
By the nature of Pinterest’s social model, unique attributes and immense popularity, unfortunately the service also serves as a fertile content infringements pasture. And if Pinterest doesn’t want to end up with biblical proportions Napster-style legal actions, it has to try fighting this phenomenon vigorously.
And so, since the beginning of the year Pinterest took a few steps to ensure content creators’ copyrights won’t be infringed- It allowed websites to install a simple code to block Pinning and it has collaborated with some of the biggest content sites (YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and Behance) to assure proper attribution.
Now, Pinterest is expanding this collaboration with more large user-generated content sites and upgrades its platform to allow playing additional types of contents on the way.
The company posted that it’s now cooperating with 500px, Etsy, Kickstarter, Slideshare and SoundCloud to provide content creators the proper attribution (linking). Whenever a user will Pin something from those sites, Pinterest will automatically generate a link to the original content page below the Pin description.
Pinterest also revamped the social networking infrastructure so it will be enable to play richer sorts of contents from those new collaborative sites. It is now possible to Pin audio tunes from SoundCloud and use an inline board player to play the music or Pin a presentation from Slideshare and slide shows directly on the photo-sharing platform.
The company is noting that it won’t be possible to change the Pin’s attribution from 500px, Etsy, Kickstarter, Slideshare and SoundCloud and that already-created Pins from those collaborative content sites will also convert automatically for proper attribution (though it might take a while to convert all).
It strikes that Pinterest is fully aware for the explosive potential of damaging the copyright of original content creators, in many cases without even the knowledge of the users which Pinned it as they simply intended to share something innocently with their friends. And it seems that we’ll see more collaborations of this kind in the future to come:
We’re continuing to work on adding new sites for our attribution program and additional ways to give credit where it’s due, so stay tuned.
